Gratitude is not perspective. It is remembering mercy.



“I complained because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”

We have all heard that expression. I happen to live with someone who has no feet.

Yet during my decades of marriage to a bilateral amputee, there have been plenty of times when I complained that my feet hurt. I have limped around the house nursing a blister while living with a woman who leans her prosthetic legs next to the nightstand.

You would think that daily reminder supplied all the perspective I needed. It did. Perspective was never the problem. Gratitude was something else.

We live in a culture that has industrialized comparison. Social media serves it to us by the scroll: Someone has more than we do, and someone else has less. The algorithm knows how to make us envious, aggrieved, or smug. It cannot make us grateful.

Seeing someone with greater challenges can put our difficulties into perspective. It may even stop us from complaining out loud for a while. We say, “I don’t have anything to complain about.” But we usually do. We simply tamp it down for decorum’s sake before returning to our regularly scheduled grumbling.

Perspective may embarrass us into silence, but silence is not gratitude. Besides, what kind of gratitude requires another person’s misery? “I was feeling sorry for myself, but then I looked at your life and felt much better” probably will not land the way we intend.

Gratitude is not looking across the room and saying, “At least I’m not you.” It is looking at mercy and saying, “You saw me.”

I learned something about that during one of Gracie’s hospitalizations.

One afternoon, I drove home from the hospital for clothes and supplies before heading back. Some friends called and asked me to stop by their home. They ushered me into their kitchen, where a place had been set for one person.

There sat a bowl of homemade vegetable beef soup, a thick slab of cornbread, and a tall glass of sweet tea. As a Southerner, it was about as fine a meal as I could imagine.

My friends quietly said, “Your boys are safe with their grandparents for spring break. Gracie is safe at the hospital. And you are safe here. Sit down, eat, and rest. We’re watching over you.”

They saw what I had not yet recognized. I had spent so much of my life watching over someone else that I did not know how to admit I needed someone to watch over me.

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I have eaten costlier meals I can barely remember. Decades later, I still remember their kitchen, the table, the chair, and that meal with clarity.

What produced gratitude in that moment? Not perspective. I already had perspective by the truckload from countless hours in hospitals and surgical waiting rooms. What moved me was not that someone else had less. It was that my friends saw the burden in my stooped shoulders.

C. S. Lewis wrote of being “Surprised by Joy.” That afternoon, I was surprised by mercy. My friends prepared a place and came toward me before I asked.

That is a picture of the gospel.

God did not rescue us by pointing to someone whose sins were worse than ours. He saw us stooping beneath a burden we could neither understand nor remove. He did not wait for us to straighten ourselves, find the right words, or properly explain our condition. He saw us, and then He came toward us.

Paul writes, “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Luke tells of 10 lepers whom Jesus healed. All 10 received something beyond their reach, but only one returned to thank Him. Receiving something, even something miraculous, does not automatically produce gratitude. One man connected the mercy he received with the One who gave it.

Jesus asked, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine?” I find that question uncomfortable because I have spent a good bit of my life among the nine.

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I have too often received mercy and hurried on to the next problem. I have prayed for provision and complained about the packaging. I have asked God to open a door and grumbled because it squeaked.

My problem was not a lack of perspective. My problem is gospel amnesia.

“Bless the Lord, O my soul,” David wrote, “and forget not all his benefits” (Psalm 103:2). Gratitude requires remembering.

Self-centeredness says, “I deserve more.” Perspective says, “Someone else has less.” Gratitude says, “I have received mercy.”

My friends did not solve our crisis that afternoon. The hard road still waited outside their home, and it continues to this day. But for a little while, I rested while someone else stood guard.

I never knew grace could smell like vegetable beef soup and warm cornbread.

That afternoon, gratitude tearfully accepted a second bowl.

Chelsea Clinton put a price tag on abortion



I never saw “Soylent Green.” But I did see Phil Hartman do a “Saturday Night Live” sketch as Charlton Heston shouting, “Soylent Green is made out of people! It’s people!” That was enough to get the idea.

The dystopian premise is not merely that human bodies become useful material. It is that people can be trained to think about human worth in purely utilitarian and economic terms. Human beings become valuable because of what they produce — or expendable when they get in the way of production.

The frightening thing about a darkened mind is not that it wakes every morning plotting evil while twirling a theatrical mustache. It is that evil begins to look reasonable.

A 2018 comment by Chelsea Clinton about abortion has been making the pro-life social media rounds again this week. The viral version says Clinton claimed abortion saved America trillions of dollars.

That sounds grotesque because it is grotesque. But fairness requires us to look at what Clinton actually said.

I checked Snopes. Its defense is that Clinton did not literally say abortion itself saved the country trillions. She said women’s increased participation in the workforce — which she connected to abortion rights after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade — added trillions of dollars to the economy.

That distinction is real. It also does not solve the moral problem.

Speaking at a 2018 “Rise Up for Roe” event, Clinton observed that women entering the American labor force between 1973 and 2009 added $3.5 trillion to the economy.

Then came the crucial sentence: “The net, new entrance of women — that is not disconnected from the fact that Roe became the law of the land in January of 1973.”

Clinton went on to suggest that people who were unmoved by arguments about abortion rights or dignity could connect their concerns to abortion through economics.

When critics translated that into less decorous English — abortion helped produce trillions in economic growth — Clinton objected. She said her point was that women’s greater workforce participation was connected to their ability to make “reproductive health care choices, including post-Roe.”

Very well. Grant her correction in full. It doesn’t solve the problem, though. It underscores it.

Clinton was not claiming that every abortion deposited money into the Treasury. Her argument was that legal abortion was among the conditions that allowed more women to enter or remain in the workforce; that greater workforce participation generated enormous economic value; and that this economic value was one consideration in favor of abortion rights.

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Notice what has happened. A human life has entered an economic equation.

The calculation is straightforward: Pregnancy may cause a woman to leave the workforce, reduce her hours, interrupt her career, or forgo income. Abortion may prevent those consequences. Therefore abortion can contribute to economic productivity.

Once stated plainly, the moral ugliness is hard to miss.

Good people instinctively know some calculations should never govern the value of a human life. Imagine announcing that America would be several trillion dollars richer if some identifiable class of people had simply ceased to exist.

Most liberals would recoil, because there is something more fundamental than the calculation. The people being calculated are human beings.

And that is precisely the question abortion advocates try to place outside the ledger.

The decisive question is not whether abortion makes it easier for somebody else to earn money. The decisive question is: Who is the unborn child?

The unborn child is not the mother and not the father. It is a distinct living human organism. The moral question is what is owed to that human being.

We recognize the principle everywhere else: One may not deliberately kill an innocent human being because his continued existence imposes economic costs on somebody else. We do not balance an innocent person’s right to live against another person’s earning potential and ask which column produces the larger number.

Yet abortion is often granted precisely this moral exemption.

Clinton’s argument does not logically require the conclusion that more abortions are always better for the economy, nor did she say that. The problem is subtler and more serious: Once economic productivity is offered as a reason favoring abortion access, the unborn child’s life has been made one variable in a cost-benefit calculation.

Money was not an incidental statistic wandering into the speech. It was offered as an argument. There is an old name for the god invoked by arguments of this sort: Mammon.

Ancient peoples sacrificed human beings to their gods and persuaded themselves that the bargain was reasonable. Prosperity might follow. Crops might flourish. Armies might triumph. The gods demanded something terrible, certainly, but one had to consider the benefits.

Modern man regards such practices with horror, congratulating himself on having escaped primitive superstition.

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Then he describes the unborn child as a reproductive impediment, calculates the economic benefit of removing that impediment, and calls himself enlightened. The deity has changed names, but the temptation is distressingly familiar.

Scripture gives us a category for understanding how intelligent and educated people can reason themselves into such conclusions. Divine judgment is not merely something awaiting mankind at the end of history. Judgment can also operate within history: God gives rebellious people over to the consequences of their rebellion. Their thinking becomes futile. Their hearts are darkened. Professing themselves wise, they become fools.

That is an especially terrifying form of judgment because the person experiencing it may regard her condition as enlightenment.

The punishment for rejecting what is good is eventually losing the ability to recognize the evil of one’s own reasoning.

The frightening thing about a darkened mind is not that it wakes every morning plotting evil while twirling a theatrical mustache. It is that evil begins to look reasonable. Categories become inverted. Killing becomes health care, and economic productivity becomes part of the case for it.

An argument that should horrify us begins to sound like respectable public policy.

The oldest cure for doomscrolling in one lyric



For nearly 20 years, the same sentence has greeted me every morning.

It first appeared on a yellow Post-it note stuck to the door of my office in Nashville. When my wife and I moved to Montana, the note came with us. Eventually, the paper curled and the ink faded, so my wife had the words beautifully rendered in calligraphy and framed.

A culture that ceases to ponder the character of God will eventually begin reinventing the character of man.

Today, they hang on the wall in my office, where I see them before I begin each day’s work.

The sentence comes from Catherine Winkworth’s 19th-century translation of Joachim Neander’s 17th-century hymn, “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty”: “Ponder anew what the Almighty can do, if with His love He befriend thee.”

The word ponder is surprisingly rare in our hymnody. Yet Neander was hardly the first to call God’s people to this discipline. More than a thousand years earlier, an ancient text from the Liturgy of St. James, rooted in the worship of the early church, gave us the hymn we know as “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence”: “Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trembling stand; ponder nothing earthly minded ...”

Silence and pondering belong together. Silence quiets the noise. Pondering fixes the mind on what is true.

Our culture has become proficient at neither.

Relentless conflict eventually exhausts everyone. We were not created merely to react to the world around us. We were created to contemplate the God who rules over it.

Ask friends, family, or neighbors how they are doing, and many will answer with the same word: “Tired.”

Fatigue has become shorthand for nearly every kind of cultural exhaustion: political, racial, social, even digital. The causes differ, but the word keeps returning. We have become exhausted by the demand to react to every controversy, and in the process we have nearly forgotten how to ponder.

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That discipline has quietly eroded. We accumulate information without assembling it. We have access to more knowledge than any generation in history, yet seem to spend less time fitting those pieces together into wisdom. We react to isolated events without considering the larger story. We spend more time contemplating the latest controversy than contemplating the unchanging character of Almighty God.

Joachim Neander built his life around a different discipline.

He frequently retreated into a valley outside Düsseldorf to pray and contemplate the majesty of God revealed in creation. That contemplation eventually found its way into his hymns.

The valley where he so often prayed and wrote came to bear his name: Neander’s Tal, or Neander’s Valley.

Nearly two centuries after his death, laborers uncovered ancient human remains there. Scientists named the discovery for the place where it was found: Neanderthal.

Today, the word has become a pejorative. We use it to describe someone as backward, primitive, or unenlightened.

The irony is striking.

Long before the world associated that name with fossils, it belonged to a man who saw with remarkable clarity. While others would one day search that valley to understand where man came from, Joachim Neander walked those same hills contemplating the One from whom man came.

That irony reaches beyond Neander’s name. The habits that shape a people’s souls eventually shape their civilization.

America’s founders inherited centuries of reflection on the character of God, the nature of man, the meaning of liberty, the demands of justice, and the proper limits of civil government. Their constitutional order reflected two convictions especially important to the American experiment: Rights do not originate with government, and human beings possess great dignity while remaining profoundly capable of abusing power.

Those convictions help explain both the founders’ insistence on individual liberty and their determination to restrain political authority.

At its best, America bore the fruit of generations that had pondered questions larger than politics itself.

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A civilization eventually follows the direction of its gaze.

A culture that ceases to ponder the character of God will eventually begin reinventing the character of man. Gratitude gives way to grievance. Stewardship gives way to entitlement. And politics begins carrying burdens it was never built to bear.

Which brings me back to the sentence hanging on my office wall. Tomorrow morning, I’ll walk into my office, glance at those familiar words, and begin another day: “Ponder anew what the Almighty can do, if with His love He befriend thee.”

The noise of the moment loses some of its authority. Headlines surrender some of their urgency. The fatigue begins to dissipate. And before long, pondering gives way to praise.

Perhaps that is why Neander ended the hymn where such pondering inevitably leads: “Let the Amen sound from His people again; gladly forever adore Him.”

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Glenn Beck says Trump can reset the world order — but success hinges on one critical thing



Glenn Beck believes that President Trump has the power to reset the world order — but his success all depends on one critical thing.

“What do you think that that success hinges on? Like, what's the if?” BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler asked him on “The Liz Wheeler Show.”

“God,” he replied tearfully.

Change can only happen, Glenn says, if people adopt the humble heart posture of “Your will, not mine.”

To illustrate his point, he shares a heartfelt story from his son’s childhood.

“My son was ... probably 8 or 9, and he was afraid to do something, and I brought him into my office,” Glenn recounts, describing how the walls were filled with pictures of his personal heroes.

“I said, ‘Son, I know you're afraid to do something, but why do I have all of these pictures of these people on my walls?’ And he said, ‘Because they were all heroes, and they did the hard things, and they weren’t afraid,”’ he continues.

Glenn then gently corrected his son: “I've read the diaries of these people. I've studied these people. ... All of them were afraid. ... They were risking everything they loved — every single one of them. But they did it anyway because there's something bigger than them.”

That bigger something was “truth.”

“If we can humble ourselves enough to get to the point to where it's more important for me to fight this now, to fight for the truth, so my children don't have to do it, and I'll take on the consequences ... we save the world — not just the nation. We save the world,” says Glenn.

But this selfless mission requires something: “a deep abiding faith in God.”

And the world is depending on America to have that faith so that it can stand for truth.

“After talking to all of these leaders over in Europe, it's clear to me, and they said it to me, ‘America is the only hope. Without America, we are all lost,’” Glenn tells Liz, reflecting on his recent trip to the U.K. where he attended a Tommy Robinson rally.

“We're the only hope. Will we remember that? Be grateful for what we do have, and stand to protect it so our children have a chance at a more peaceful world tomorrow,” he says.

To hear more of Glenn’s powerful take, watch the video above.

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Anne Hathaway and the push for older motherhood. Is this a good thing?



Pregnant celebrities on red carpets may make later-in-life motherhood look effortless, but BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey is warning that the reality is far more complicated.

Most recently, Anne Hathaway graced the red carpet in a beautiful dress, showing off her bump at 43 years old. While this is Hathaway’s third baby, many women are taking it as proof that women can and should wait until their 40s to become a mother.

“She’s a beautiful pregnant woman. I am so happy for her,” Stuckey says. “And I’m so glad that she is on social media. She’s on the red carpet showing that you can do all of these things. You can have a baby. I also love that she is showing that you don’t have to stop having a baby when you’re 35 just because they call you ‘geriatric’ or whatever it is.”

“You can keep having a baby, and it's beautiful. It doesn’t ruin your life,” she adds.


Now, the media is running with Hathaway’s pregnancy and making it seem as if it's as easy to get pregnant in your 40s as it is in your 20s or 30s.

“The Wall Street Journal published an article on July 13 titled, ‘Your 40s used to be middle age. Not anymore,’” Stuckey explains.

“While I am happy about all the things that I listed, and I’m happy about the contribution of another image-bearer of God to the world, and I think motherhood is fantastic, the risks have not changed in association with pregnancy after 40,” she continues.

“Am I saying that you shouldn’t do it if you are a married woman? No. But just because we changed the name because geriatric was offensive doesn’t mean that the risks don’t exist. It is much more difficult to get pregnant after 35 and especially after 40,” she adds.

But the risks don’t just affect the mother.

“The risks to the baby do increase after that,” she says.

And it’s not just the health risks associated with later pregnancies that have Stuckey concerned, but the unrealistic view of time.

“It is pushing this idea that you can party through your 20s, chase your career through your 30s, choose to settle down when you are 38 and you will be just as likely to get married and have children and be a trad wife when you are 45 as if you did it when you were 25,” she says.

“I just don’t want to sell women this unrealistic vision of what their life will absolutely look like if they defer marriage for promiscuity and for their career to be a girlboss forever,” she continues.

“I don’t have a problem obviously with women getting pregnant later in life. I have a problem with us presenting that as if it ... is the ideal,” she adds.

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